AMY WILSON CARMICHAEL (18671951)

Missionary to
India; founder of the Dohnavur Fellowship, a society devoted to saving
neglected and ill-treated children

Amy Beatrice (a.k.a. Wilson)
Carmichael (December 16, 1867January 18, 1951) was a Protestant Christian
missionary in India, who opened an orphanage and founded a mission in Dohnavur.
She served in India for fifty-six years without furlough and authored many
books about the missionary work.

She was born in the small village of
Millisle in Northern Ireland to devout Presbyterians, David and Catherine
Carmichael and was the oldest of seven children. After her father's death, she
was adopted and tutored by Robert Wilson, cofounder of the Keswick Convention.
In many ways she was an unlikely candidate for missionary work. She suffered
neuralgia, a disease of the nerves that made her whole body weak and achy and
often put her in bed for weeks on end. It was at the Keswick Convention of 1887
that she heard Hudson Taylor speak about missionary life. Soon afterward, she
became convinced of her calling to the same labour.

Initially Amy
travelled to Japan for fifteen months, but she later found her lifelong
vocation in India. She was commissioned by the Church of England Zenana
Missionary Society. Much of her work was with young ladies, some of whom were
saved from forced prostitution. The organization she founded was known as the
Dohnavur Fellowship. Dohnavur is situated in Tamil Nadu, just thirty miles from
the southern tip of India. Under her loving guidance, the fellowship would
become a place of sanctuary for more than one thousand children who would
otherwise have faced a bleak future. In an effort to respect Indian culture,
members of the organization wore Indian dress and the children were given
Indian names. She herself dressed in Indian clothes, dyed her skin with coffee,
and often travelled long distances on India's hot, dusty roads to save just one
child from suffering.

In 1931, Carmichael was badly injured in a fall,
which left her bedridden much of the time until her death. Amy Carmichael died
in India in 1951 at the age of 83. She asked that no stone be put over her
grave; instead, the children she had cared for put a bird bath over it with the
single inscription "Amma", which means mother in the Tamil.

Amy
Carmichael's work also extended to the printed page. She was a prolific writer,
producing thirty-five published books including His Thoughts Said . .
. His Father Said (1951), If (1953), and Edges of His Ways
(1955). Best known, perhaps, is an early historical account, Things as They
Are: Mission Work in Southern India (1903).